Founders - #10 Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

Episode Date: July 27, 2017

What I learned from reading Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight.The best teacher I ever had, one of the finest men I ever knew, spoke of the Oregon Trail often. It’s our birthright, he’d growl. Our character, our fate—our DNA. “The cowards never started, the weak died along the way—that leaves us.” [0:35]Some outsized sense of possibility mixed with a diminished capacity for pessimism. [1:03]I found it difficult to say what or who exactly I was, or might become. Like all my friends I wanted to be successful. I didn’t know what that meant. [2:11]Deep down I was searching for something else, something more. I had an aching sense that our time is short, shorter than we ever know. And I wanted mine to be meaningful. And purposeful. And creative. And important. Above all . . .different. [2:35]I asked myself: What if there were a way, without being an athlete, to feel what athletes feel? To play all the time, instead of working? Or to enjoy work so much that it becomes essentially the same thing? [4:23]The only answer was to find some prodigious, improbable dream that seemed worthy, that seemed fun, that seemed like a good fit, and chase it with a single-minded dedication and purpose. [4:47]Maybe my Crazy Idea just might . . . work? Maybe. No, no, I thought. It will work. By God, I’ll make it work. No maybes about it. [5:29]So much about those days has vanished. Faces, numbers, decisions that once seemed pressing and irrevocable, they’re all gone. [6:39]What remains is this one comforting certainty, this one anchoring truth that will never go away. At 24 I did have a Crazy Idea, and somehow, despite being dizzy with existential angst, and fears about the future, and doubts about myself, as all young men and women in their mid-twenties are, I did decide that the world is made up of crazy ideas. History is one long processional of crazy ideas. The things I loved most — books, sports, democracy, free enterprise — started as crazy ideas. [7:03]So that morning in 1962 I told myself: Let everyone else call your idea crazy. Just keep going. Don’t stop. Don’t even think about stopping until you get there. Whatever comes, just don’t stop. [7:45]That is the advice I managed to give myself, out of the blue, and somehow managed to take. Half a century later, I believe it’s the best advice — maybe the only advice — any of us should ever give. [8:08]I knew Japanese cameras had made deep cuts into the camera market, which had once been dominated by Germans. I argued in my paper that Japanese running shoes might do the same thing. [9:00]He was impressed. It took balls to put together an itinerary like that, he said. Balls. He wanted in. [12:01]Carter never did mess around. See an open shot, take it—that was Carter. I told myself there was much I could learn from a guy like that as we circled the earth. [12:14]What Phil was doing was looked upon by most of his family as crazy and extremely dangerous. [12:37]Go home, a faint inner voice told me. Get a normal job. Be a normal person. Then I heard another faint voice equally emphatic, “No. Don’t go home. Keep going. Don’t stop.” [14:15]Bill Bowerman was a genius coach, a master motivator, a natural leader of young men, and there was one piece of gear he deemed crucial to their development. Shoes. He was obsessed with how human beings are shod. [15:55]He always had some new scheme to make our shoes softer and lighter. One ounce sliced off a pair of shoes is equivalent to 55 pounds over one mile. [16:42]Lightness, Bowerman believed, directly translated into less burden, more energy, and more speed. Lightness was his constant goal. [17:11]Frugality carried over to every part of the coach’s makeup. [17:56]Bowerman didn’t give a damn about respectability. He possessed a prehistoric strain of maleness. Today its all but extinct. He was a war hero, too. Of course, he was. [18:47]Bowerman never considered himself a track coach. He detested being called coach. He called himself a professor of competitive responses. His job, as he saw it, was to get you ready for the struggles and competitions that lay ahead. [19:41]In my mind, he was Patton with a stopwatch. [20:00]He had tested me. He had broken me down and remade me just like a pair of shoes. [23:31]The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones. [23:57]He always went against the grain. Always. He was the first college coach to emphasize rest, to place as much value on recovery as on work. [24:12]He [his Dad] said he hadn’t sent me to Oregon and Stanford for me to become a door to door shoe salesman. How long do you think you’re going to keep jackassing around with these shoes? I shrugged. I don’t know, Dad. [26:19]My sales strategy was simple. I drove all over to various track meets. Between races, I’d chat up the coaches and runners, and show them my wares. The response was always the same. I couldn’t write orders fast enough. [28:17]I’d been unable to sell encyclopedias, and I’d despised it to boot. I’d been slightly better at selling mutual funds, but I’d felt dead inside. So why was selling shoes so different? Because I realized, it wasn’t selling. I believed in running. I believed if people got out and ran a few miles every day the world would be a better place. And I believed these shoes were better to run in. People sensing my belief wanted some of that belief for themselves. Belief is irresistible. [28:44]Johnson believed that runners are God’s chosen, that running, done right, in the correct spirit and with the proper form, is a mystical exercise, no less than meditation or prayer, and thus he felt called to help runners reach their nirvana. [33:18]Not even the Yahweh of running, Bowerman, was as pious about the sport as Blue Ribbon’s Part-Time Employee Number Two. [33:43]I shook my head. I tell the man Blue Ribbon is sinking like the Titanic, and he responds by begging for a berth in first class. [35:58]At the time I was reading everything I could get my hands on about generals, samurai, shoguns, along with biographies of my three main heroes—Churchill, Kennedy, Tolstoy. . . I wasn’t that unique. Throughout history, men have looked to the warrior for a model of Hemingway’s cardinal virtue, pressurized grace.[37:03]Each new customer got his, or her own index card. Each index card contained that customer’s personal information, shoe size, and shoe preferences. He had hundreds and hundreds of customer correspondents, all along the spectrum of humanity, from high school track starts to octogenarian weekend joggers. [40:17]In all the world there had never been such a sanctuary for runners, a place that didn’t just sell them shoes but celebrated them and their shoes. [42:54]I wanted what everyone wants. To be me, full-time. [45:29]I wanted to dedicate every minute of every day to blue ribbon. I’d never been a multitasker and I didn’t see any reason to start now. [45:59]If my life was to be all work and no play, I wanted my work to be play. [46:15]Phil Knight is in his 5th year in business and still has a full-time job. How many people would be willing to do that? [46:51]Right before my thirty-first birthday I made the bold move and went full-time at my company. [48:21]When you read this book you really feel like you get to know Phil Knight and you were there throughout his struggles. [49:39]I struggle to remember. I close my eyes and think back, but so many precious moments from those nights are gone forever. Numberless conversations, breathless laughing fits. Declarations, revelations, confidences. They’ve all fallen into the sofa cushions of time. I remember only that we always sat up half the night, cataloging the past, mapping out the future. I remember that we took turns describing what our little company was, and what it might be, and what it must never be. How I wish, on just one of those nights, I’d had a tape recorder. Or kept a journal. [49:50]For the first eight years of Blue Ribbon they are selling other people’s shoes. [54:00]This is the moment we’ve been waiting for. No more selling someone else’s brand. No more working for someone else. If we are going to succeed or fail we should do so on our own terms. [56:05]How he felt after the IPO: I asked myself. What are you feeling? If I felt anything, it was . . . regret. Good God, I thought. Yes. Regret. Because I honestly wished I could do it all over again. [59:31]Above all, I regret not spending more time with my sons. [1:01:42]God, how I wish I could relive the whole thing. [1:02:01]I’d like to share the experience, the ups and downs, so that some young man or woman, somewhere, going through the same trials and ordeals, might be inspired or comforted. Or warned. Some young entrepreneur, maybe, some athlete, or painter, or novelist, might press on. It’s all the same drive. The same dream. [1:02:06]I’d tell men and women in their mid-twenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don’t know what that means, seek it. If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt. [1:02:34]I’d like to warn the best of them, the iconoclasts, the innovators, the rebels, that they will always have a bulls-eye on their backs. The better they get, the bigger the bulls-eye. It’s not one man’s opinion; it’s the law of nature. [1:03:10]I’d like to remind them that America isn’t the entrepreneurial Shangri-La people think. Free enterprise always irritates the kinds of trolls who live to block, to thwart, to say no. Entrepreneurs have always been outgunned, outnumbered. They’ve always fought uphill, and the hill has never been steeper. America is becoming less entrepreneurial, not more. A Harvard Business School study recently ranked all the countries in the world in terms of their entrepreneurial spirit. America ranked behind Peru. [1:03:27]Giving up doesn’t mean stopping. Don’t ever stop. [1:04:23] ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. 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I was up before the others, before the birds, before the sun. I drank a cup of coffee, wolfed down a piece of toast, put on my shorts and sweatshirt, and laced up my green running shoes, then slipped quietly out the back door. I stretched my legs, my hamstrings, my lower back, and groaned as I took the first few bulky steps into the cool road, into the fog. Why is it always so hard to get started? There were no cars, no people, no signs of life. I was all alone, the world to myself. The best teacher I ever had, one of the finest men I ever knew, spoke of the Oregon Trail often. It's our birthright, he'd growl. Our character,

our fate, our DNA. The cowards never started, and the weak died along the way. That leaves us. Us. Some rare strain of pioneer spirit was discovered along that trail, my teacher believed. Some outside sense of possibility mixed with a diminished capacity for pessimism. That foggy morning, that momentous morning in 1962, I'd recently blazed my own trail, back home, after seven long years away. It was strange being home again, strange being lashed again by the daily rains. Stranger still was living again with my parents and twin sisters, sleeping in my childhood bed. Late at night, I'd lie on my back, staring at my college textbooks and my high school trophies and blue rimmeds, thinking,

This is me? Still? On paper, I thought, I'm an adult. Graduated from a good college, University of Oregon. Earned a master's from a top business school, Stanford. Survived a year-long hitch in the United States Army at Fort Lewis and Fort Eustace. My resume said I was a learned, accomplished soldier A 24-year-old man in full So why, I wondered, why do I still feel like a kid? I had found it difficult to say what or who exactly I was or might become Like all my friends, I wanted to be successful Unlike my friends, I didn't know what that meant Money? Maybe

Wife? Kids? House? Sure, if I was lucky. These were the goals I was taught to aspire to, and part of me did aspire to them, instinctively. But deep down, I was searching for something else, something more. I had an aching sense that our time is short, shorter than we ever know, short as a morning run.

And I wanted mine to be meaningful and purposeful and creative and important. Above all, different. And then it happened. As my young heart began to thump, as my pink lungs expanded like the wings of a bird. As the trees turned to greenish blurs, I saw it all before me. Exactly what I wanted my life to be. Play. Yes, I thought, that's it.

That's the word. The secret of happiness I'd always suspected, the essence of beauty or truth, or all we ever need to know of either, lay somewhere in that moment when the ball's in midair, when both boxers sense the approach of the bell, when the runner near the finish line and the crowd rises as one. There's a kind of exuberant clarity in that pulsing half second before winning and losing are decided. I wanted that, whatever that was, to be my life, my daily life. At different times, I'd fantasized about becoming a great novelist, a great journalist, a great statesman. But the ultimate dream was always to be a great athlete. Sadly, fate had made me good, not great. At 24, I was finally resigned to that fact.

I'd run track at Oregon and I'd distinguished myself lettering three of four years. But that was that, the end. Now as I began to clip off one brisk six minute mile after another as the rising sun set fire to the lowest needles of the pines, I asked myself, what if there were a way, without being an athlete, to feel what athletes feel? To play all the time instead of working? Or else to enjoy work so much that it becomes essentially the same thing? The world was so overrun with war and pain and misery. The daily grind was so exhausting and often unjust.

Maybe the only answer, I thought, was to find some prodigious, improbable dream that seemed worthy, that seemed fun, that seemed a good fit, and chase it with an athlete's single-minded dedication and purpose. Like it or not, life is a game. Whoever denies that truth, whoever simply refuses to play, gets left on the sidelines. I didn't want that. More than anything, that was the thing I did not want, which led, as always, to my crazy idea. Maybe, I thought. Just maybe. I need to take one more look at my crazy idea. Maybe my crazy idea might just work? Maybe. No. No, I thought. Running faster. Faster. Running as if I were chasing someone and being chased all at the same time. It will work. By God, I'll make it work. No maybes about it.

I was suddenly smiling, almost laughing, drenched in sweat, moving as gracefully and effortlessly as I ever had. I saw my crazy idea shining up ahead, and it didn't look all that crazy. It didn't even look like an idea. It looked like a place. It looked like a person, or some life force that existed long before I did, separate from me, but also part of me, waiting for me, but also hiding from me. That might sound a little high flown, a little crazy, but that's how I felt back then. Or maybe I didn't. Maybe my memories enlarging this eureka moment are condensing many eureka moments into one. Or maybe if there was such a moment, it was nothing more than runner's high.

I don't know. I can't say. So much about those days and the months and years into which they slowly sorted themselves has vanished. Like those rounded, frosty puffs of breath. Faces, numbers, decisions that once seemed pressing and irrevocable, they're all gone. What remains, however, is this one comforting certainty. This one anchoring truth that will never go away. At 24, I did have a crazy idea. And somehow, despite being dizzy with existential angst and

fears about the future and doubts about myself, as all young men and women are in their mid-20s are, I did decide that the world is made up of crazy ideas. History is one long processional of crazy ideas. The things I love most, books, sports, democracy, free enterprise, started as crazy ideas. So that morning, in 1962, I told myself, let everyone else call your idea crazy. Just keep going. Don't stop.

Don't even think about stopping until you get there. And don't give much thought to where there is. Whatever comes, just don't stop. That's the precious, prescient, urgent advice I managed to give myself out of the blue and somehow managed to take. Half a century later, I believe it's the best advice, maybe the only advice, any of us should ever give. This episode, I want to talk to you about the New York Times bestseller, Shoe Dog, a memoir by the creator of Nike, Phil Knight. So I want to jump right into the book, and I want to start with a description of his crazy idea. And this is from the chapter 1962.

It was one of my final classes, a seminar on entrepreneurship. I'd written a research paper about shoes and the paper had evolved from a run of the mill assignment to an all out obsession. Being a runner, I knew something about running shoes. Being a business buff, I knew that Japanese cameras had made deep cuts into the camera market, which had once been dominated by Germans. Thus, I argued in my paper that Japanese running shoes might do the same thing. The idea interested me, then inspired me, then captivated me. It seemed so obvious, so simple, so potentially huge. I spent weeks and weeks on that paper. I moved into the library, devoured everything I could find out about importing and exporting, about starting a

company. Finally, as required, I'd given a formal presentation of the paper to my classmates, who reacted with formal boredom. Not one asked a single question. They created my passion and intensity with labored sighs and vacant stares. The professor thought my crazy idea had merit. He gave me an A. So all throughout that run and the introduction when he's talking about his crazy idea, he's saying, hey, why don't I try to import inexpensive Japanese shoes and compete with the European brands that are currently dominating the market. As he was mentioning, he had this existential angst like most of us do

about what's going to happen in my life, who am I, what am I going to become? And he decides that before he starts setting out to be an adult, he's going to travel the world. He wants to see the entire world and he figures, hey, part of my world trip, I can stop in Japan, make some appointments with these factories, shoe factories, and see if I can do a deal and start importing some of these Japanese shoes to sell. So he's putting this together. He's putting the idea, and before he pitches his dad,

because he needs to borrow money from his dad to do this, he tells his friend, long before approaching my father, I decided it would be good to have a companion on my trip, and that companion should be my Stanford classmate Carter. Though he'd been a hoop star at William Jewell College, Carter wasn't your typical jock. He wore thick glasses and read books, good books. He was easy to talk to and easy not to talk to, equallyally important qualities in a friend. Essential in a travel companion.

But Carter laughed in my face when I laid out the list of places I wanted to see. Hawaii, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Rangoon, Calcutta, Bombay, Sagan, Kathmandu, Cairo, Istanbul, Athens, Jordan, Jerusalem, Nairobi, Rome, Paris, Vienna, West Berlin, East Berlin, Munich, London. He rocked back on his heels and guffawed. Mortified, I looked down and began to make apologies. Then Carter, still laughing, said, What a swell idea, Buck. Just let me interject right here. Buck is his nickname, so his dad calls him that. All his friends call him Buck,

even though his Philip was his given name at birth. I looked up. He wasn't laughing at me. He was laughing with joy, with glee. He was impressed. It took balls to build together an itinerary like that, he said. Balls. He wanted in. Days later, he got the okay from his parents, plus a loan from his father. Carter never did mess around. See an open shot, take it. That was Carter. I told myself there was much I could learn from a guy like that as we circled the earth. I think wanting to travel the world, especially right after college or even before,

it might be pretty common now. But he makes the point that in 1962, 90% of Americans at the time had never even been on an airplane. What he was doing was looked upon by most of his family as crazy and extremely dangerous. He winds up getting approval from his dad. They make the first stop. They fly to Hawaii. And they have an open-ended plane ticket. So it's not like they said,

okay, we're going to stay in Hawaii for a few days. So they wind up landing in Hawaii and liking it so much that they rent an apartment and get jobs. So they're staying there for several months. They get jobs going door-to-door, selling encyclopedias, which Phil hates. He's not very good at. Then he gets a job selling securities and investments, mutual funds, and the like.

And he's making enough money. And then, well, let me just go to the book and you will see. A perfect Hawaiian autumn followed. Days of contentment and something close to bliss, followed by a sharp restlessness. One night, I set my beer on the bar and turned to Carter. I think maybe the time has come to leave Shangri-La, I said. I didn't make a hard pitch. I didn't think I had to. It was clearly time to get back to the plan. But Carter frowned and stroked his chin. Gee, Buck, I don't know. He had met a girl, a beautiful Hawaiian teenager with long brown legs and jet black eyes, the kind of girl who greeted our airplane and the kind I dreamed of having and never would.

He wanted to stick around, and how could I argue? I told him I understood, but I was cast low. I left the bar and went for a long walk on the beach. Game over, I told him I understood, but I was cast low. I left the bar and went for a long walk on the beach. Game over, I told myself. The last thing I wanted was to pack up and return to Oregon. But I couldn't see traveling around the world alone either. Go home, a faint inner voice told me. Get a normal job.

Be a normal person. Then I heard another faint voice, equally emphatic. No, don't go home. Keep going. Don't stop. So Phil leaves Carter in Hawaii on Thanksgiving day. He flies to Tokyo. He gets to Tokyo and he sets up a bunch of appointments with different factories, shoe factories. And he pitches them on his idea to import the shoes they're manufacturing and their brand and being a distributor and selling them on the west coast of the United States. He winds up doing a deal for the shoe called the Tiger. And so then once he does that, they make an agreement. He takes another two months and he does this world trip. And there's a lot of interesting stories in there, but I wasn't

sure how to share it without sharing the whole thing. And it's like 20 pages. So it'd be too long to read on the podcast. So I'm just telling you this so you can understand where we're at in the story. Now we're going to jump ahead because there's two people that I think are instrumental to the success of what becomes Nike outside of Phil Knight and the first one is the co-founder of Nike where this time it's called Blue Ribbon and it was Phil's track coach and one of the most famous track coaches even to this day his name is Bill Bowerman and Bill Bowerman is quite the character so I want to talk about I want to tell you about him for a little bit. So let's jump ahead. Then I sent two pairs to my old track coach at Oregon, Bill Bowerman. I did so without a second thought,

since it was Bowerman who first made me think, really think, about what people put on their feet. Bowerman was a genius coach, a master motivator, a natural leader of young men. And there was one piece of gear he deemed crucial to their development, shoes. He was obsessed with how human beings are shod. In the four years I'd run for him at Oregon, Bowerman was constantly sneaking into our lockers and stealing our footwear. He'd spend days tearing them apart, stitching them back up, then hand them back with some minor modification, which made us either run like deer or bleed. Regardless of the results, he never stopped.

He was determined to find new ways of bolstering the instep, cushioning the midsole, building out more room for the forefoot. He always had some new design, some new scheme to make our shoes sleeker, softer, lighter, especially lighter. One ounce sliced off a pair of shoes, he said, is the equivalent to 55 pounds over one mile. He wasn't kidding. His math was solid. You take the average man's stride of six feet, spread it out over a mile, you get 880 steps. Remove one ounce from each step, that's 55 pounds on the button. Lightness, Bowerman believed, directly translated to less burden, which meant more energy, which meant more speed. And speed equaled winning. Bowerman didn't like to lose. I got it from him. Thus, lightness was his constant goal.

And then skipping ahead a little bit, Bowerman obviously has a profound effect on Phil and their relationship lasts a lifetime. And so we're going to go into that a little bit before jumping back into the personality of Bowerman, which I think you'll find interesting. It's possible that everything I did in those days was motivated by some deep yearning to impress, to please Bowerman. Besides my father, there was no man whose approval

I craved more. And besides my father, there was no man who gave it less often. Frugality carried over to every part of the coach's makeup. He weighed and hoarded words of praise like uncut diamonds. I loved Bowerman and feared him, and neither of these initial impulses ever went away. Sometimes the fear was less, sometimes more. Sometimes it went right down to my shoes, which he had probably cobbled with his bare hands. Love and fear, the same binary emotions, governed the dynamic between me and my father. I wondered sometimes if it was a mere coincidence that Bowerman and my father, both cryptic, both alpha, both inscrutable, were both named Bill. And yet the two men were driven by different demons. My father, the son of a butcher, was always chasing

respectability, whereas Bowerman, whose father had been governor of Oregon, didn't give a damn for respectability. He was also the grandson of the legendary pioneers, men and women who walked the full length of the Oregon Trail. When they stopped walking, they founded a tiny town in eastern Oregon, which they called Fossil. Bowerman spent his early days there and compulsively returned. Part of his mind was always back in Fossil, which was funny because there was something distinctly fossilized about him. Hard, brown, ancient, he possessed a prehistoric strain of maleness, a blend of grit and integrity and calcified stubbornness that was rare in Lyndon Johnson's America. Today, it was all but extinct.

He was a war hero too. Of course he was. The most famous track coach in America, Bowerman never considered himself a track coach. He detested being called coach. Given his background, his makeup, he naturally thought of track as a means to an end. He called himself a professor of competitive responses. And his job, as he saw it and often described it, was to get you ready for the struggles and competitions that lay ahead far beyond Oregon. So let me just interject into this part here. I think this is an interesting paragraph for me because throughout the entire book, Phil constantly compares the art of business with running, with sport. He also sometimes uses the metaphor that businesses war without bullets.

And he elaborates on this and says sometimes the metaphor is not perfect, but you kind of see this throughout the entire book. And I couldn't help but thinking back to this paragraph where he's saying that Bowerman thought of his job not only to get his runners as fast as possible, but to prepare them for struggles and competitions that lay ahead after they're done running. So let's go back to the book. Despite this lofty mission, or perhaps because of it, the facilities at Oregon were spartan. Dank wooden walls, lockers that hadn't been painted in decades. In fact, the lockers had no doors, just slats to separate your stuff from the next guy. We hung our clothes on nails rusty nails we sometimes ran without socks complaining never crossed our minds we saw our coach as a general to be obeyed quickly and blindly in my mind he was patent with a stopwatch that is when he wasn't a god now this is these two paragraphs i had to absolutely include. It gives you an idea if you haven't gotten so already exactly who this Bowerman fellow was. Like all ancient gods,

Bowerman lived on a mountaintop. His majestic ranch sat on a peak high above the campus, and when reposing on his private Olympus, he could be vengeful as the gods. One story told to me by a teammate brought this fact pointedly home. Apparently, there was a truck driver who often dared to disturb the peace on Bowerman Mountain. He took turns too fast and frequently knocked over Bowerman's mailbox. Bowerman scolded the trucker, threatened to punch him in the nose, and so forth, but the trucker paid no heed. He drove as he pleased

day after day. So Bowerman rigged the mailbox with explosives. Next time the trucker knocked it over, boom! When the smoke cleared, the trucker found his truck in pieces, its tires reduced to ribbons. He never again touched Bowerman's mailbox. A man like that, you didn't want to get on his wrong side, especially if you were a gangly middle-distance runner from the Portland suburbs. I always tiptoed around Bowerman. Even so, he'd often lose patience with me, though I remember only one time where he got really sore. This is another important part. I was a sophomore being worn down by my schedule. Class all morning, practice all afternoon, homework all night. One day, fearing that I was coming down with the flu, I stopped by Bowerman's office to say I wouldn't be able to

practice that afternoon. Uh-huh, he said. Who's the coach of this team? You are? Well, as coach of this team, I'm telling you to get your ass out there. And by the way, we're going to have a time trial today. I was close to tears, but I held it together, channeled all my emotion into my run and posted one of my best times of the year. As I walked up the track, I glowered at Bowerman. Happy now, you son of a bitch? He looked at me, checked his stopwatch, looked at me again, and nodded. He had tested me. He had broken me down and remade me, just like a pair of shoes. And I had held up.

Thereafter, I was truly one of his men of Oregon. And just two more paragraphs on Bowerman. I pulled up to Bowerman's stone fortress and marveled. Bowerman had built it with his bare hands. I wondered how on earth he'd managed all that back-breaking labor by himself. The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones. Amid the booming silence, I kept my eyes on the road and mulled over Bowerman's eccentric personality, which carried over to everything he did. He always went against the grain. Always. For example, he was the first college coach in America to emphasize rest,

to place as much value on recovery as on work. But when he worked you, brother, he worked you. Bowerman's strategy for running the mile was simple. Set a fast pace for the first two laps, run the third as hard as you can, then triple your speed on the fourth. There was a zen-like quality to the strategy because it was impossible and yet it worked. Bowerman coached more sub four-minute milers than anybody ever. After Phil sends Bowerman the shoes, they have lunch. Bowerman says, hey, why don't you let me in on this deal? And they go in as partners with Phil owning 51% of the company and Bowerman is 49. So I'm not going to cover Bowerman's innovations too much in this podcast, but throughout the book, he's kind of like a mad scientist.

One of the most famous stories of Nike you'll hear is when they developed the running shoe by using a waffle iron. That was Bowerman. That wasn't Phil. And so throughout the entire time up until his death, I think in 1999, he had made innovation after innovation even after he stopped coaching. And he was an extremely successful running coach. He coached the Olympics I think two or three times. So I think Nike wouldn't be where it is without Bowerman

and then without this guy, Jeff Johnson, that we're going to talk about in a minute. But before I get there, I want to, as listeners of past podcasts will know, I have this section that usually occurs in almost every one of these biographies that I'm reading. And I affectionately call it Critics Don't Know Shit. And I'd like to add an entry to our Critics Don't Know Shit section. When he's selling, he's selling, Phil's selling shoes's he's selling phil selling shoes he's doing he's selling them out of his out of his trunk at these track meets and uh out of his parents house but his dad doesn't like this remember he just talked about how his dad's always wanting uh

other people to like respect him and his family so he said he hadn't sent me to oregon and stanford to become a door-to-door shoe salesman, he said. Jackassing around. That's what he called it. Buck, he said, how long do you think you're going to keep jackassing around with these shoes? I shrugged. I don't know, Dad. So his dad is accusing him of jackass.

And then this is, I wrote in the note, a mother's love. So I shouldn't have been too surprised by my mother's next move when my father accused me of jackassing around. Casually, she opened her purse and took out $7. I'd like to purchase one pair of limber ups, please, she said, loud enough for him to hear. Limber ups was one of the names of the shoes he was selling. Was it my mother's way of digging at my father? A show of loyalty to her only son? An affirmation of her love of track?

I don't know. But no matter, it never failed to move me. The sight of her standing at the stove or the kitchen sink, cooking dinner or washing dishes in a pair of Japanese running shoes, size six. So here we have in the early 1960ss his dad is telling him to stop jackassing around go get a normal you know quote-unquote respectable job and the company that he started winds up being like being nike where they're doing i think fast forward today 30 billion in sales a year or something like that uh phil knight is a multi-billionaire um and so again this wasn't there's no way anybody could predict this in the early 1960s.

In fact, part of the book talks about how running wasn't even really considered a sport. They talk about how if you were running in Oregon just for fun, people would drive by and make fun of you, tell you to get a horse. Some people would throw drinks at runners. So it's not like how it is today where very much an accepted part of fitness and a global sport. So I want to skip ahead. I want to talk about Phil's sales strategy and the power of belief. And let's go right into it. My sales strategy was simple and I thought rather brilliant.

After being rejected by a couple of sporting goods stores, I drove all over the Pacific Northwest to various track meets. Between races, I'd chat up to coaches, to runners, the fans, and show them my wares. The response was always the same. I couldn't write orders fast enough. Driving back to Portland, I'd puzzle over my sudden success at selling. I'd been unable to sell encyclopedias and I despised it to boot. I've been slightly better at selling mutual funds, but I felt dead inside. So why was selling shoes so different? Because I realized it wasn't selling.

I believed in running. I believe that if people got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place. And I believed these shoes were better to run in. People sensing my belief wanted some of that belief for themselves. Belief, I decided, belief is irresistible. Sometimes people wanted my shoes so badly that they'd write me or phone me saying they heard about the new Tigers and just had to have a pair. Could I please send them COD? Without even trying, my mail order business was born. Sometimes people would simply show up at my parents' house. Every few nights, the doorbell would ring and my father, grumbling, would get up from his vinyl recliner and turn down the TV and wonder who in the world. There on the porch would be some skinny kid with

oddly muscular legs, shifty-eyed and twitchy, like a junkie looking to score. A buck here, the kid would say. My father would call through the kitchen to my room in the servant's quarter. I'd come out, invite the kid in, show him over to the sofa, then kneel before him and measure his foot. My father, hands jammed into his pockets, would watch the whole transaction incredulous. On July 4th, 1964, I sold out my first shipment. I wrote to Tiger and ordered 900 more. I had a venerable partner, a legitimate bank, and a product that was selling itself.

I was on a roll. Okay, so now I want to skip ahead. I want to talk to you about the first full-time employee Nike ever has, and this is this guy named Jeff Johnson. And just like Phil and just like Bowerman, he's very eccentric. I got a letter from that Jeff Johnson fellow at the start of the year. After our chance meeting at Occidental, this is a track meet, I'd sent him a pair of Tigers as a gift,

and now he wrote to say that he'd tried them on and gone for a run. He liked them, he said. He liked and gone for a run he liked them he said he liked them a whole lot others liked them too people kept stopping him and pointing at his feet and asking where they could buy some neat shoes like that he was looking for ways to earn extra cash and apart from his gig as a social worker i wrote him back and offered him a post as a commissioned salesman meaning i'd give him a.75 for each pair of running shoes he sold, two bucks for each pair of spikes. He wrote back right away, accepting the offer.

And this is going to get into the beginning of his eccentricity. He wrote back right away, accepting the offer. And then the letters didn't stop. On the contrary, they increased in length and number. At first they were two pages, then four, then eight. At first they came every few days. Then they came faster and faster, tumbling almost daily through the mail slot like a waterfall,

until I wondered what in God's name I'd done in hiring this guy. I liked his energy, of course, and it was hard to fault his enthusiasm, but I began to worry that he might have too much of each. With the 20th letter or the 25th, I began to worry that the man might be unhinged. I wondered why everything was so breathless. I wondered if he was ever going to run out of things he urgently needed to tell me or ask me. I wondered if he ever was going to run out of things he urgently needed to tell me or ask me. I wondered if he ever was going to run out of stamps. Every time a thought crossed Johnson's mind, seemingly, he

wrote it down and stuck it into an envelope. He wrote to tell me how many tigers he'd sold that week. He wrote to tell me how many tigers he'd sold that day. He wrote to tell me, again, tiger is the brand that Blue Ribbon is selling. He wrote to tell me who again, Tiger is the brand that Blue Ribbon is selling. He wrote to tell me who had warned Tigers at which high school meet and in what place they finished. He wrote to say that he wanted to expand his sales territory beyond California to include Arizona and possibly New Mexico. He wrote to suggest that we open a retail store in Los Angeles. He wrote to tell me that he was considering placing ads in running magazines and what did I think. He wrote to inform me that he placed those ads in running magazines and the response was good.

He wrote to ask why I hadn't answered any of his previous letters. He wrote to plead for encouragement. He wrote to complain that I hadn't responded to his previous plea for encouragement. In his heart of hearts, Johnson believed that runners are God's chosen. That running, done right, in the correct spirit and with the proper form of running, Bowerman, was as pious about the sport as Blue Ribbon's part-time employee number two. So before I continue with Johnson, part-time employee number one is Phil Knight. And as I'll continue, for the first six or seven years of Nike, he's doing this part-time,

which is, again, something really surprising to me and why I wanted to include it in the podcast. So eventually, as we're going to see here, Johnson becomes their first full-time employee. And I think the section we're tying in, as you see from Johnson's personality over the next few pages, I think this ties directly into the section we just talked about with belief and the fact that Phil didn't understand why could I sell shoes when I hated selling mutual funds

and I couldn't sell encyclopedias. And I also think like, if you believe that you only have one life and you understand that whatever your creative endeavor, whatever you're gonna do for work or living is gonna be a large part of the time that you're awake, maybe even 50% or more of the time you're awake, it should be something that you're passionate about or something you love to do. And I don't know how many of us ever get to that point, but I'm kind of shocked in my own

conversations at how many people don't even try. Johnson is not one of those people. And here's what the book says about that. Above all, Johnson wanted to make a living doing it, meaning running, which was next to impossible in 1965. In me, in blue ribbon, he thought he saw a way. I did everything I could to discourage Johnson from thinking like this. At every turn, I tried to dampen his enthusiasm for me and my company. Besides not writing back, I never phoned, never visited, never invited him to Oregon. I also never missed an opportunity to tell him the unvarnished truth. In one of my rare replies to his letters, I put it flatly. Though our growth has been good, I owe First National Bank of Oregon $11,000. Cash flow is negative.

He wrote back immediately, asking if he could work for me full time. This is Derek Ho from Johnson. I want to be able to make it on Tiger, and the opportunity would exist for me to do other things as well, running, school, not to mention being my own boss. I shook my head. I tell the man blue ribbon is sinking like the Titanic, and he responds by begging for a berth in first class. I just think that's great writing. Oh, well, I thought, if we do go down, misery loves company. So in late summer of 1965, I wrote and accepted Johnson's offer to become the first full-time employee of Blue Ribbon.

So more on Johnson. The typical Johnson letter would invariably close with a lament, either sarcastically or poignantly earnest about my failure to respond to his previous letter and the one before that. Then there would be a PS and usually another PS. Then one last plea for encouraging words, which I never sent. I didn't have time for encouraging words. Besides, it wasn't my style. I look back now and wonder if I was truly being myself or if I was emulating Bowerman or my father or both. Was I adopting their man of few words demeanor? Was I maybe modeling all the men I admired? At the time, I was reading everything I could get my hands on about general samurai, shoguns, along with biographies of my three main heroes, Churchill, Kennedy, and Tolstoy.

And let me just interject real quick. I love that he's learning from biographies. The way I got the idea to do this podcast was I was watching an interview, which is also a podcast with Elon Musk. And he was asked, like, what books on business did he like and like to get him started? Because, like, how did you learn how to become an entrepreneur? I guess was the theme of the question. And he's like, well, I don't read business books. I read biographies. And I just struck was like, damn, that's a really good idea.

And here we are, maybe 15 episodes later. So back to the story. I had no love of violence, but I was fascinated by leadership or lack thereof under extreme conditions. War is the most extreme of conditions, but business has its warlike parallels. Someone somewhere once said that business is war without bullets, and I tended to agree. So again, this just goes back to how he's learning and these metaphors of

war and game and sports and running that run throughout this book. I wasn't that unique. Throughout history, men have looked to the warrior for a model of Hemingway's cardinal virtue, pressurized grace. Hemingway himself wrote most of a movable feast while gazing at a statue of Marshal Ney, Napoleon's favorite commander. Again, I'm just going to interject. I hate to keep interrupting, but there's a huge, like there's a depth to Phil Knight that I did not understand until I read this book. And it's especially pronounced on his, when he's in his early twenties and he's going through his trip around the world, but he's a, he's a very avid reader and he's fascinated by history and he has all these like little aphorisms throughout the book. And you know

there that he's pulling from history because it'll be in the middle of a paragraph, but then it'll be italicized like him reflecting back to something he learned his early 20s. So let's go back to this section of the book. One lesson I took from all my homeschooling about heroes was that they didn't say much. None was a blabbermouth, none micromanaged. And then this is one of the aphorisms that's italicized. Don't tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results. So I didn't answer Johnson and I didn't pester him. Having told him what to do, I hoped that he would surprise me. To Johnson's credit, though he craved more communication, he never let the lack of it discourage him. On the contrary, it motivated him. He was anal. He recognized that I was not. And though he enjoyed complaining, he saw that my managerial style gave him freedom.

Left to do as he pleased, he responded with boundless creativity and energy. He worked seven days a week selling and promoting Blue Ribbon. And when he wasn't selling, he was beavershly building up his customer data file so this is an interesting part it goes back to the eccentricity of Johnson and why I think he was so important to the foundation of Nike he develops almost like what I would call an analog CRM each new customer got his or her got his or her own index card and each index card contained that customers's personal information, shoe size, and shoe preferences. This database enabled Johnson to keep in touch with all of

his customers at all times and to keep them all feeling special. He sent them Christmas cards, he sent them birthday cards, he sent them notes of congratulation after they completed a big race or marathon. Whenever I got a letter from Johnson, I knew it was one of the dozens he'd carried down to the mailbox that day. He had hundreds and hundreds of customer correspondence all along the spectrum of humanity, from high school track stars to octogenarian weekend joggers. Many, upon pulling yet anotherson letter from their mailboxes must have thought the same thing i did where does this guy find the time so skipping ahead a little bit uh this is this is i'm going to talk to you about phil's schedule in 1990s in 1966 and um

and johnson again and i love this uh this this like religious theme that goes throughout the book how a lot of the early nike employees were all runners and it was almost like a they pursued their passion with almost like a religious fervor and there's gonna be some direct mentions of that um so johnson is constantly sending him letters like we need to open a real retail store we need to open a retail store we need to open a retail store and phil either ignores him or just tells him no and he says you know what okay if you sell 3 250 pairs and he gave him like six months or something like that then you can open it and he set a goal so high he's like the guy's never gonna do it so that's a way for me putting him off and so here's what happens somehow johnson hit the magic number by the end of june he had sold 3 250 pairs

of tigers thus he was holding me to my end of the bargain before labor day he leased a small retail space in santa monica and opened our first ever retail store he then set about turning the store into a mecca a holy of holies for runner. Again, here, note the religious themes. He bought the most comfortable chairs he could find and afford from yard sales, and he created a beautiful space for runners to hang out and talk. He built shelves and filled them with books that every runner should read, many of them first editions from his own library. He covered the walls with photos of tiger shod runners

and laid them out in a supply of silk screened t-shirts with Tiger across the front, which he handed out to his best customers. In all the world, there had never been such a sanctuary for runners, a place that didn't just sell them shoes, but celebrated them and their shoes. Johnson, the aspiring cult leader of runners, finally had his church. Services were Monday through Saturday, 9 to 6. So this idea where Johnson sets up a sanctuary for runners, I was reading about the very popular brand Lululemon, and they're doing this 50 years later but they realized that they

needed they were developing yoga clothes for yoga and and activities like that and so instead of just trying to sell you clothes for yoga they tried to expand the market into making yoga more easily accessible um and so if you go to like a lululemon store today you'll see like they have all the local yoga classes. Now they've branched out to other flywheels or boot camps or any other physical endeavor that you would wear their clothing for. Immediately when I read this, I thought of that parallel. I was like, wow, that's exactly what Little Lemon's doing now to much success. So this is, even though they've opened their first retail store, I want to tell you about Phil's schedule.

And when he first wrote me about the store, I thought of the temples and shrines I'd seen in Asia, and I was anxious to see how Johnson's compared. But there just wasn't time. Between my hours at Price Waterhouse, my drunken revels with haze, my nights and weekends handling the minutiae connected with Blue Ribbon, and my 14 hours each month soldiering in the reserves, I was on fumes so this is just a again an eye-opening thing because i don't think when many people think of nike you're not going to realize how humble their beginnings were but the point was he had to work full-time to support him and his wife at the time uh so he's an accountant at pricewaterhouse at night his boss makes him go out and drink with him that's tase

and it says then the other nights and weekends i'm handling uh orders for blue ribbons and trying to run the company and this entire time he has to give the army reserves 14 hours a month so obviously a schedule like that can't be kept up and so we're going to change that right before he changes that though he visits the store he uh He visits Johnson at his apartment. Johnson's apartment is basically stacked to the roof with shoes. And any part that's not taken up by shoes is taken up by books. Johnson was a, he just, he loved books.

He reads all the time. I just want to read this one sentence that fills us. He goes, I thought I loved to read. Johnson was next level. Okay, so now we're going to skip ahead to 1968. I like this part, and it says, especially these four words. He goes, to be me full time. So let's see what he means by that. I was putting in six days a week at Pricewaterhouse, spending early mornings and late nights and all weekends and vacations at Blue Ribbon. No friends, no exercise, no social life,

and wholly content. My life was out of balance, sure, but I didn't care. In fact, I wanted even more imbalance, or a different kind of imbalance. I wanted to dedicate every minute of every day to Blue Ribbon. I'd never been a multitasker and I didn't see any reason to start now. I wanted to be present always. I wanted to focus constantly on the one task that really mattered. If my life was to be all work and no play, I wanted my work to be play. I wanted to quit Price Waterhouse. Not that I hated it. It just wasn't me. I wanted what everyone wants, to be me full time. Back to this section though.

So he talks about I want to be me full time. But it wasn't possible. Blue Ribbon simply couldn't support me. Though the company was on track to double sales for a fifth straight year, it still couldn't justify a salary for its co-founder. And again, a lot of people I think are in too big of a rush to quote unquote succeed. Phil Knight is his fifth year in the business and he still has a full-time job. How many people would be willing to do that now? And I want to skip ahead and continue this

point. So that's in 1968. In the beginning of the chapter in 1969, things change. And the note I left here is 31 years old and now first time founder. Again, a lot of people think, oh, you have to be successful in your early 20s or it's not going to happen. I've seen this even said on Twitter before. And I'm glad that the person tweeted that, got a lot of pushback and used a lot of historical examples where that's definitely not true. And in Phil Knight's case, he was 31 before he was able to start and he pays himself just $18,000. So it's not like he was out there balling. Suddenly, a whole new cast of characters was wandering in and out of the office.

Rising sales enabled me to hire more and more reps. Most were ex-runners and eccentrics, as only ex-runners can be. But when it came to selling, they were all business. Because they were inspired by what they were trying to do, again, see that theme keeps popping up, and because they worked solely on commission, they were burning up the roads, hitting every high school or college track meet within a thousand mile radius. And their extraordinary efforts were boosting our numbers even more. We had posted $150,000 in sales in 1968, and in 1969,

we were on our way to just under $300,000. Though Wallace was still breathing down my neck, hassling me to slow down and moaning about my lack of equity, I decided that Blue Ribbon was doing well enough to justify a salary for its founder. Right before my 31st birthday, I made the bold move. I quit and went full-time at my company, paying myself a fairly generous salary of $18,000 a year. Okay, and I just want to skip ahead a little bit. So obviously the book is huge. I bought the hard cover and it's like almost 400 pages. So it's, as I've said in past podcasts, the goal of this podcast is definitely not to summarize the books. I'm just pulling out interesting parts. And hopefully you learn

something and you're entertained at the same time. But if you want the full story, obviously read the book. This is something that's really interesting because I'm going to close on his regrets, but we're not there yet. But I just found this really beautiful and great writing. And then I wrote some notes to myself when I was reading this book about doing more documentation of like, see, my daughter's five years old now. And it's cliched as it is. Everybody tells you when your child's born,

oh, it's gonna go by so fast, it's gonna go by so fast. You're like, yeah, yeah, sure. They're right. And it just makes me realize, like I want to start recording conversations I have with her, put her more on video.

We already do take a lot of pictures, but you'll see why. And I just think this is really, really great writing. And just, again, goes back to the authenticity. This book feels like when you read this book, you really feel like you know Phil Knight and you were there throughout his entire struggles. And oh my God, there's a lot of struggle.

So let's hear what he says. I struggle to remember. I close my eyes and think back, but so many precious moments from those nights are gone forever. Numberless conversations, breathless laughing fits, declarations, revel revelations confidences they've all fallen into the sofa cushions of time i remember only that we always sat up half the night cataloging the past mapping out the future i remember that we took turns describing what our little company was and what So what he's talking about there is going back to the very foundations of the company

and having conversations or experiences that you think you're going to remember forever, and now half a century later, they're gone. They just don't exist. And I just think that's a really great writing when it's like, they've all fallen into the sofa cushions of time. So I think this is applicable to not only like your business or whatever your creative path is in life. But like I just said, like to me, it's like, okay, well,

not only do I want to document that, but I want like, how can I translate this to like my personal life and my family life? Um, I don't know. I got, I got a little nostalgic. Um, when I read that part. So now I'm going to skip way ahead. I'm skipping like 50 pages ahead in the book. So this entire time, he's a distributor for this company, uh, in Japan and they sell tiger shoes, but the name of the company is, I mean, I don't know. I don't know Japanese, but it looks like to me, it says Onitsuka. So maybe Onitsuka, it's O-N-I-T-S-U-K-A. So I think however you want to pronounce that. And remember how I said on previous podcasts, why I think like studying history is so important, especially for entrepreneurs, is history doesn't repeat what human nature does.

And we've drawn parallels through all different books, in some cases separated by hundreds of years. And the part I'm about to share with you now is really reminiscent of, if you remember the podcast I did a few weeks ago, it's on the Henry Ford. It's called I Invented the Modern Age. And one of the smartest parts, something that really stuck out with me in that book, is this idea that you really want as much control on your idea or your company as possible. There's this anecdote that I shared on the podcast, and you can read more in the book. I'd recommend reading it. It's really good. And it's the Dodge Brothers, which you'll recognize the name from the Dodge Motor Company.

At the time, we're just basically a subcontractor for Ford Motor Company. So they'd build out the chassis and all the stuff for Ford, but they didn't want the hassle of selling the cars themselves. So they're at a department store, and their attorney's like, hey, why don't you guys sell your own car? And the guy's like, you know, we don't want to. It's too big of a hassle. And he's like, but I have to remind you,

like your contract can be canceled by either side with just 12 months notice and you've built up all this infrastructure. You have all these factories, all these people. So what happens if Ford decides to pull out the rug from underneath you? What are you going to do then? And then they answer that.

Well, why don't you believe in andrew carnegie's aphorisms that um you should put all your eggs in one basket and then watch the basket and the lawyer's like i do but it's not your basket it's ford's basket so they went up that advice sinks in they take his advice they start selling their own car in in to still producing materials for Ford. And sure enough, Ford decides a few years later that he's not, the Dodge brothers are a huge shareholder in Ford Motor Company, he's not going to pay out dividends anymore because he wants to build a huge new factory. And what you can take away from that story is that Ford decided the eggs were his.

So you get to keep the basket but the eggs are mine and so if they had not made that switch they could potentially be out they could have been ruined and they were fine because at that point they had already three or four years of selling their own car so they just made a transition so the reason i bring that up now is because for most of the let's say the first what is this maybe eight years of of blue ribbon, which is they are selling other people's shoes. So they realized that this company, Onitsuka, or however you want to pronounce that, they were having fights. There would be delays on their orders. Then they found out that they were looking to

replace distributors in the United States, so essentially cutting off Blue Ribbon. So in this time, about a year before this happens, Phil decides, hey, we need to make our own shoe. So he goes and contracts with other factories, both in Japan and in Mexico, and builds what becomes Nike. And it's a good thing he does that because again, history doesn't repeat itself, human nature does, because then Onitsuka cuts him off. And I labeled my note here in the book is, this is the birth of Nike. I laid out the situation we faced. We've come, folks, to a crossroads. Yesterday, our main supplier, Onitsuka, cut us off. I let that sink in. I watched everyone's jaw drop. Until it all sorts out, we're completely on our own. We're set adrift. We have this new line,

Nike, which the reps in Chicago seem to like, but well, frankly, that's all we've got. I looked down the table. Everyone was sinking, slumping. I looked at Johnson. He was staring at the papers before him, and there was something in his handsome face, some quality I'd never seen there before. Surrender. Like everyone else in the room, he was giving up. The nation's economy was in the tank. A recession was underway. Gas lines, political gridlock, rising unemployment, Nixon being Nixon. Vietnam. It seemed like the end times. Everyone in the room had already been worrying about how they were going to make their rent, pay their light bill. Now this. I cleared my throat. So, in other words, I said, I cleared my throat again, pushed aside my yellow legal pad. What I'm trying to say is, we've got them right where we want them.

Johnson lifted his eyes. Everyone around the table lifted their eyes. They sat up straighter. This is the moment, I said. This is the moment we've been waiting for. Our moment. No more selling someone else's brand. No more working for someone else. On It's Sucker has been holding us down for years. Their late deliveries, their mixed up orders, their refusal to hear and implement our design ideas. Who among us isn't sick of dealing with all that? It's time we faced facts. If we're going to succeed or fail, we should do so on our own terms, with our own ideas and our own brand. We posted $2 million in sales last year, none of which has anything to do with Onitsuka. That number was a testament to our ingenuity and hard work.

Let's not look at this as a crisis. Let's look at this as our liberation, our independence day. Yes, it's going to be rough. I won't lie to you. We're definitely going to war, people. But we know the terrain. We know our way around Japan now. And that's one reason I feel in my heart, this is a war we can win. And if we win it, when we win it, I see great things for all of us on the other side of victory.

We are still alive, people. We are still alive. So that happens in the 70s. I'm going to skip the next, let's say, eight years and go right to the IPO. They figure it out. Bowerman makes some impressive designs. He's also the Olympic coach at the time, so they get a ton of athletes. They start signing up, which is very common now with all these endorsements. And it's funny. The first endorsement they do is like $5,000.

And then the next one, a few later, is like $100,000 to endorse the Nike shoe. This is when their sales are like in the hundreds of millions or something like that. And it's funny. Phil writes, he goes, that's fine. You can have the $100,000, but no one will ever get an endorsement that large again. It's pretty funny because then I think of like the LeBron James Nike endorsement, which is rumored to be about $30 million a year every year until LeBron dies. Which, if he lives into the 70s or 80 IPO, including having to fight at one time the U.S. government, having to fight Adidas and Converse. And there's all these trials and tribulations.

And if you're interested in that, definitely read the book. But I want to settle on two more parts that I thought were just really interesting. So Nike winds up having their IPO the same week that Apple does. And this is where the story ends. Then the next chapter is just him reflecting in his 70s about this. So I wanted to share some stuff over there with you as well. But I was really shocked by this. And I'm not so much shocked because I've now heard this several times in studying this, but I think this is counterintuitive. So, and the note I left for myself was how he felt after the IPO.

I asked myself, what are you feeling? It wasn't joy. It wasn't relief. If I felt anything, it was regret. Good God, I thought. Yes, regret. Because I honestly wished I could do it all over again. I fell asleep for a few hours. When I woke, it was cold and rainy. I went to the window. The trees were dripping water. Everything was mist and fog. The world was the same as it had been the day before, as it had always been. Nothing had changed, least of all me. And yet I was worth $178 million.

I showered, ate breakfast, drove to work. I was at my desk before anyone else. And now I want to close. So every chapter, the first chapter is named as Dawn, then every chapter is the year that it's taking place, all the way up until the IPO. Then the last chapter is called Night. And he shares some personal stories, some of which are extremely tragic.

What I think we can learn the most from is he lists his regrets. And to put this in context, he's writing these words in his mid-70s. They're coming to close out of his memoir. And I think that we probably all think we know what we want. And we know what will make us happy, even though I think most of us have evidence that we're entirely terrible predictors of what will actually make us happy. So I think there's a lot of things that don't change throughout time, going back to the fact that history, should be the human nature repeats

itself. And so I think that there's a lot of knowledge in the regrets of somebody that's close to the end of their life, which, you know, hopefully Phil lives into his hundreds, but he's, I think, 79 today. So I want to want to close on this part. Of course, above all, I regret not spending more time with my sons. Maybe if I had, I could have solved the encrypted code of Matthew Knight. And yet I know that this regret clashes with my secret regret, that I can't do it all over again. God, how I wish I could relive the whole thing. Short of that, I'd like to share the experience, the ups and downs, so that some young man or woman somewhere going through the same trials and ordeals might be inspired or comforted or warned.

Some young entrepreneur maybe, some athlete or painter or novelist might press on. It's all the same drive, the same dream. It would be nice to help them avoid the typical discouragements. I would tell them to hit pause. Think long and hard about how they want to spend their time and with whom they want to spend it for the next 40 years. This is so important in my opinion. I'd tell men and women in their mid-20s not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling.

Even if you don't know what that means, seek it. If you're following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear. The disappointments will be fuel. The highs will be like nothing you've ever felt. I'd like to warn the best of them, the iconoclasts, the innovators, the rebels, that they will always have a bullseye on their backs. The better they get, the bigger the bullseye. It's not one man's opinion.

It's a law of nature. I'd like to remind them that America isn't the entrepreneur of Shangri-La people think. Free enterprise always irritates the kinds of trolls who live to block, to thwart, to say no. Sorry, no. And it's always been this way. Entrepreneurs have always been outgunned, outnumbered. They've always fought uphill and the hills have never been steeper. America is becoming less entrepreneurial, not more. A Harvard Business School study recently ranked all the countries of the world in terms of their entrepreneurial

spirit. America ranked behind Peru. And those who urge entrepreneurs to never give up, charlatans. Sometimes you have to give up. Sometimes knowing when to give up, when to try something else, is genius. Giving up doesn't mean stopping. Don't ever stop.